If I don't read, I get lonely. If I don't write, I forget who I am.

Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.

Actors! They travel the world and all they see is a mirror.

When Kevin Brockmeier says, Everything, given the possibility, would choose to be a song, I recognize the implicit truth of such a miracle. What can I say, I'm Irish, and we take naturally to that sort of thing.

As David Roderick says about writing, It's not the tale that pleases, it's the telling, and I could not agree more.

I'm always looking for poetry's place in the prose. For that moment, let's say, that arrests time, or that sentence in which the musical matrix or trope, the sounds of the words arranged in a way that heightens perception, a tunefulness that more clearly defines and transfers the feeling I'm after to the reader.